The Unmined Vein
Your notes are full of gold. You know it. Some of these ideas could change things—the right industry, the right product, the right framing of a problem everyone's been getting wrong.
But they just sit there.
Maybe you're not sure which ones are actually good. They all seem good when you write them down. They all seem obvious two weeks later. You can't tell the difference between insight and illusion.
Maybe you don't know what to do next. An idea in a notes app isn't anything yet. But what's the next step? Write about it? Build something? Tell someone? Every path forward seems arbitrary.
Maybe you're protecting them. If you put an idea into the world and it fails, then it wasn't as good as you thought. As long as it stays in the notes app, it retains its potential. Schrödinger's insight.
Whatever the reason, you're sitting on unmined veins while others dig in shallower ground and find enough to build on.
Why Veins Stay Unmined
The unmined vein isn't a storage problem. It's a refining problem.
Ideas in their raw form are ore. They contain value, but you can't spend ore. You can't build with it. You have to refine it first—extract the usable material from the surrounding rock.
Refining an idea means:
- Articulating it clearly enough that someone else can understand it
- Testing it against reality to see if it holds
- Finding the application—the specific context where it creates value
- Packaging it in a form that can travel
Most idea people skip all of this. They pull ore out of the ground, look at it, say "that's probably gold," and move on to the next hole.
The vein stays unmined because mining is work. Finding ideas is fun. Refining them is tedious. So the notes app fills up while nothing gets extracted.
What Mining Looks Like
The Unmined Vein becomes valuable when you commit to extraction.
Pick one idea. Just one. Not the best one—you can't tell which one is best until you test them. Just one that's interesting enough to stick with.
Then refine it:
- Articulate it. Write it out properly. Not a note—an explanation. If you can't explain it clearly, you don't understand it yet.
- Test it. Put it in front of someone. Write about it publicly. Try to apply it to something real. See if it survives contact with reality.
- Find the application. Where does this idea create value? For whom? In what context? An idea without application is philosophy. Philosophy is fine, but it's not the Idea Game.
- Package it. Make it portable. A framework. A tactic. A one-liner. Something someone else can pick up and use without needing the whole context of your brain.
One refined idea is worth more than a thousand raw ones. You don't need more ideas. You need to mine what you have.